The present invention relates generally to the field of monitoring systems, and more particularly to monitoring and determining a condition of a machine's operation performance.
Various equipment used in many types of buildings are often powered by a number of machines located in what is often referred to as a machine room. Depending on factors such as, for example, the size and nature of use of the building, the machine room may house many machines. In order to ensure proper and reliable function and operation, each of the machines may require frequent monitoring and maintenance.
Some machines may include integrated instrumentation and network communications capability, allowing them to self-monitor and identify conditions relating to their operation performance, such as, for example, conditions relating to degradation or impending issues, and to report out such conditions. These machines may execute self-maintenance or problem-flagging operations as such degradation or impending issues occur, allowing for maintenance action to take place before machine failure can occur. Other machines may not have this capability, and may require certain maintenance practices which might rely on a maintenance technician to identify degradation or impending issues in machine operation performance by detecting human-perceptible indications of such conditions exhibited by the machine, so as to allow for the subsequent performance of maintenance.
It is typical for a number of machines to operate within the same machine room and within close proximity of each other. Such conditions can contribute to obscuring human-perceptible indications of degradation or impending issues in machine operation performance exhibited by any particular machine present in the machine room and can make identifying such indications difficult or impossible. For maintenance practices which might rely on a maintenance technician to identify indications of degradation or impending issues in machine operation performance exhibited by any particular machine, for example, by “listening” to the machines, this may result in such maintenance practices being generally unreliable, and can ultimately put the proper operation of machines, and consequently, those people and organizations dependent on such machines, at risk of unplanned downtime, or otherwise.
It would be advantageous to be able to monitor a number of machines positioned within the same general area as each other in order to identify degradation or impending issues in a machine's operation performance, so as to allow for the performance of targeted machine maintenance well before machine failure can occur.